Speaker:

• John G. Russell (Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Gifu University)

Moderator:

• Kyle Cleveland, ICAS Co-Director

Overview

Generative AI and robots do not so much project our future as reflect our past and the vice-like grip that past holds on our present. They replicate and embody toxic racial and gender biases and stereotypes that reinforce, rather than challenge, discriminatory patterns of human social behavior. These technologies impact our very perception of reality and the elements thought to comprise it: race, gender, and sex. Generative AI has ushered in a brave new world of deep fakes, voice clones, and photorealistic avatars that are virtually indistinguishable from the “real thing,” a distinction that itself, as the technology advances, may face extinction.

In this talk on 11 July, John G. Russell will argue that the “existential threat” posed by AI lies not in its potential to eradicate humanity in a dramatic Terminator-style apocalypse or to replace humans as agents of manual and intellectual labor but in its capacity to undermine, destabilize, and potentially impair our ability to distinguish artifice from reality while simultaneously replicating both the toxic reality of society’s racial and gender biases and their real-world consequences. Through a discussion of the white bias endemic in these technologies, the speaker will explore how these technologies, once limited to the imagination but now marketable and profitable products of material culture, have come to both embody and give new life to the perdurable biases of their globally situated eurocentric creators and how they reflect a selective, racially narcissistic self-love and albescent vision of futurity from which black people, as the paraphrased Björk title of the talk suggests, have been largely excluded.

Speaker:

John G. Russell

Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Gifu University

John G. Russell is an Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Faculty of Regional Studies at Gifu University. His research focuses on representations of race and gender in Japanese and American popular culture. He is the author of Nihonjin no kokujin-kan [Japanese Perceptions of Blacks] (Shinhyōron, 1991) and Henken to sabetsu ga dono yō ni tsukurareru ka [How are Prejudice and Discrimination Produced?] (Akashi Shoten,1995) and has contributed articles to numerous journals, including Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Cultural Anthropology, positions: east asia cultures critique, Japanese Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction and The Journal of American Culture as well as to The Japan Times, Japan Quarterly, Music Magazine, and CounterPunch.

Moderator:

Kyle Cleveland

Co-director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS) and Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University, Japan Campus

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